David Baddiel - Jews Dont Count

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First published in Great Britain in 2021 by TLS Books

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Source ISBN: 9780008399474

Ebook Edition February 2021 ISBN: 9780008399498

Version: 2020-12-23

To my mother, Sarah Fabian-Baddiel,

who never failed to make herself count.

Im going to give you some examples of a recurring phenomenon. My publisher here is the Times Literary Supplement, so lets begin with a literary example. In August 2020, the British newspaper the Observer, which, along with its sister paper the Guardian, is politically the most progressive mainstream news outlet in the country, published a review of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmans first novel Antkind, by a critic called Holly Williams. It wasnt a very positive review, criticising the book mainly because the narrator operates from what Williams calls a white-male-cis-het perspective. In other words self-evidently white, male and, less self-evidently, possessed of a gender that is neither trans nor non-binary, and a sexuality that is straight. Anyone occupying this square of characteristics is considered, by those who assume that all social structures are underpinned by power, privileged. White-male-cis-hets have four head starts in life. A book written from a white-male-cis-het perspective would routinely be marked down by a platform like the Observer, keen always to re-centre the cultural conversation away from that square.

However, the narrator in Antkind is called B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. He describes himself early on as having a rabbinical beard, as Jewish-looking; perhaps even more of a giveaway, at one point he wears a tie with the slogan 100% Kosher. There are numerous occasions when other characters behave anti-Semitically towards him, assuming his behaviours tally with Jewish stereotypes, whispering Jew under their breath as he leaves rooms, or shouting Fuck you, Hebrew! directly at him. But in the Observer review, theres no mention of his Jewishness, or the issue of Jewishness in the book in general, despite it including thank you, Kindle sixty mentions of the word Jew, and ninety of the word Jewish. And, of course, Charlie Kaufman himself is Jewish.

But I guess none of this, for Holly Williams, has any bearing on B. Rosenberger Rosenbergs white-male-cis-het perspective: no bearing, that is, on his privilege.

Here is another example, this time from the Danish comedian Sofie Hagen. In a very good 2019 short film she made about body positivity, Hagen recites a list of the most oppressed people in society, a list that includes: Black people and people of colour, queer people, trans people, Muslims and people with disabilities. Which indeed is a pretty good stab at covering the waterfront of what many progressives would consider to be the most oppressed groups, the most persecuted minorities, in society.

But it misses out one persecuted minority, one of the most persecuted minorities in history. Now. Imagine that the main character in Antkind belonged to any of these minorities that Hagen mentions. The central premise of the Observer review that the problematic issue with Antkind is that it is written from a white-male-cis-het perspective would dissolve, and with it, most of the reviews negativity. Which means that despite the history of persecution, there is only one minority that, for the privilege-checkers, stays firmly in the square of privilege.

Time for a high literary example: on New Years Day 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Jeremy Irons reading from the complete collection of T. S. Eliots poems, almost in their entirety. Anyone who knows Eliots poetry will know that reading all of his poems means the inevitable inclusion of these lines from Gerontion:

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

And from Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar:

The rats are underneath the piles.

The Jew is underneath the lot.

I remember listening, and wondering how the BBC would get round this. When it came to these particular poems, they enlisted the help of Anthony Julius, a Jewish lawyer, and the author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form